Did Pokemon Go Just Make The Hololens Exciting

Jul 1, 2016
· 383 words
· 2 minute

Today, I spent an hour walking around my neighbor looking for Pokémon. Pokémon GO is the thing everyone is talking about. Never has an app affected human behavior at such scale. If you go outside right now, you see people walking around neighborhoods and stores on the hunt for Pokémon.

I have been reading countless articles about how sales are down for Macs. Also, how this fall’s iPhone is going to be a boring release and not crazy like they usually are every two years. We also can’t forget about how we were all heartbroken by the rumor about the headphone jack on the latest iPhone.

Lately, we have seen smartwatches and VR as some of the biggest disruptions in consumer products. Most people have been priced out of VR until the fall with the ps4 will become somewhat affordable. Smartwatches you can only get some excited about.

Pokémon GO came out around the 20th anniversary of the original games. It is the first AR product to hit the mainstream. The company behind Pokémon GO had a similar type of real world game that never got above the niche factor.

Last night I found this GIF

For any of the people who have been playing the Pokémon game, doesn’t that concept look amazing? I think we have done a lot of thinking about some concepts and applications of VR, but what about AR?

Pokémon GO is going to start a wave of some other apps borrowing a similar philosophy. There has been a lot talked about the future of VR and the products in the pipeline. But, what other applications are available for AR? The video has got the vibe of a Black Mirror episode. What would be a good way to toggle gaming on and off? Imagine if we had glasses and could check for Pokémon unprovoked without warning.

There were some questions raised when Google Glass had some buzz. It is going to be interesting to see if the HoloLens can become a product that we can have these types of experiences with. The HoloLens dev kits are slowly started to ship; you can apply now and get one for $3000. I hope that a consumer product would be considerably cheaper, but I am sure that is a few years away.